Health literacy: Exploring future directions and potential contributions from health psychology

Abstract

Health psychology has the potential to contribute meaningfully to our understanding of the concept, processes, and outcomes of health literacy. Three areas for discussion are presented here: (1) health literacy as a multimodal concept; (2) the role of the health-care system, the professional, and tools of the trade; and (3) the relevance of social context, participation, and empowerment. The three levels of health literacy proposed by Nutbeam are mapped onto the four evolving approaches in health psychology proposed by Marks to explore the synergy between these research areas. It is hoped that this Special Section on Health Literacy will generate more discussion and activity among health psychologists into health literacy research and practice.

The meaning of colours in nutrition labelling in the context of expert and consumer criteria of evaluating food product healthfulness

“…Health literacy is an important factor in the ability to make healthful choices (Estacio, 2013;Estacio and Comings, 2013). As it is perceived as an outcome of health promotion (Nutbeam, 2000), health literacy can be improved, among other things, by education and communication related to frontof-pack nutrition labels.…”

Health and legal literacy for migrants: twinned strands woven in the cloth of social justice and the human right to health care

“…Rocher [51] stated that: “to understand the level of effectiveness of a law involves tracing the diversity of its effects and impacts, intended or unintended, planned or accidental, direct or indirect, foreseen or unexpected, social, political, economic, or cultural” (p. 133). The importance given here to the addressing the legal obstacles to be overcome when accessing medical care rests on the premise that it is only when women and men, newcomers or not, are able to decode the language of law and of health, that the principle of universal access to health and to justice can truly be said to have been applied [15, 52, 53]. In other words, “[t] he intervention has to be accessible, acceptable, effective in, and used by the most disadvantaged group within that population to be truly effective at reducing inequities in health” [54].…”

“…Health literacy, similarly to legal literacy, consists of a certain ability to understand, assess, access and communicate selected information in order to engage with complex demands in complex contexts for specific purposes in reference to one’s well-being [11, 15, 52, 61, 72–74]. In his seminal paper, Nutbeam [16] recognised three levels of health literacy, where greater health literacy results in an individual not only being able to access health care, but to understand, and ultimately to critically engage in ensuring just outcomes.…”

“…South American educator, Paolo Freire’s work on education and the raising of consciousness served as the basis of an intervention model that still influences health professionals who seek to empower individuals and communities through building critical health literacy [15, 52, 73–75]. Freire’s work emphasised that people educate themselves together, in their shared relationship with reality [75].…”

“…For health and legal literacy to support a migrant community’s critical engagement with the barriers to care and citizenship rights that they encounter, requires reciprocal education efforts, with migrants learning to employ the host medico-legal system, and the system being adapted to respond sensitively to migrant’s cultural conceptualisations of health [15–17]. It is this critical and reflexive literacy that ultimately allows migrants to take control of their experienced social determinants of health to improve both their social participation and quality of life [11, 17, 19].…”